Nothing But a Hound Dog: Mikheil’s Javakhishvili’s ‘Kvachi’

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If you read one 500-page classic of Georgian literature this year, make it Mikheil’s Javakhishvili’s galloping 1924 epic, Kvachi Kvachantiradze. Contemplating the exploits of its titular conman, who has the “acute nose and instinct of a pedigree hound,” brings to mind the description of Lucien de Rubempré, the protagonist of Honoré de Balzac’sLost Illusions: “He’s not a poet, this young man: he’s a serial novel!”

Unlike Lucien and the Bildungsroman heroes of similarly panoramic novels, Kvachi makes no claims to be an aesthetic creature. On his European voyage, the thieving rogue stays in bed to peruse his pornographic collection rather than visit the Strasbourg Cathedral, wonders why someone doesn’t glue some arms onto the Venus de Milo, and says the following of Auguste Rodin’s “Thinker:” “That man is thinking up some great plot, I know. I wish I could meet him, he’d be a good comrade.” (What better proof that all criticism is a mode of autobiography?) And yet the boorish Kvachi does share one crucial trait with his Balzacian forbears: he is incapable of living a plot-free life.

In his brief introduction to newly released English translation, the scholar and translator Donald Rayfield writes of Kvachi’s author’s sad fate during the Stalinist regime’s Great Terror of 1937. Javakhishvili was tortured and executed after praising the courage of a poet who shot himself rather than denounce his fellow writers for their alleged anti-revolutionary tendencies. One wishes that the laws of picaresque fiction applied to life and that Javakhishvili could have magically been blessed with the same Houdini-like powers of his unscrupulous protagonist, who cheats death many a time throughout his larcenous career.

What the slippery, often-hunted Kvachi lacks in integrity he makes up for in ingenuity. On the run from the Red Army’s secret police, he draws up a search order to “find and arrest the notorious counter-revolutionary, saboteur, and bandit Kvachi Kvachantiradze.” Kvachi himself then stops in at the local police departments of each town to check if the wanted man — that is, himself — is in the area. “My god,” says one of his associates, “So you’re searching for yourself, then?”

Apart from revealing Kvachi’s brazenness, the clever ruse points to something more fundamental about his restless character. The episodic Georgian novel dramatizes Kvachi’s fruitless search for himself, for some feat that will satisfy his insatiable desire for power, women, and money, and finally “bridle his fate’s headstrong Pegasus.”

Kvachi is born into a family of provincial inn-keepers on a portentous day that is “deceitful, false, and treacherous.” (Kvachi will be all three.). The young Kvachi has the “unusual ability to divine people’s characters” and lives according to the following maxim: “Never refuse anybody anything, but only honor your promises if it’s profitable for you today or tomorrow at the latest.”

The novel, which began as a series of sketches, hurtles from one of Kvachi’s scams, scrapes, or seductions to the next, pausing every so often to drive home the monstrosity of its hero. Kvachi is a philistine, attempted rapist, blackmailer, and cold-hearted murderer, not a lovable cad. He begins his unsavory career with lower-stakes swindles and acts of thuggery in his homeland: scamming shopkeepers, defrauding his elderly landlady out of her house, setting up a fake anarchist group to extort rich students or convince one stubbornly honest teacher to pass him and his friends. The future crimes carried out by him and his loyal (to an extent) co-conspirators range from inspired — robbing a bank while posing as a film director shooting a bank robbery scene — to unimaginative and brutal—blackmailing a lover with pictures taken of them in flagrante.

His schemes are all excessive, indicative of a compulsion to defraud that goes beyond mere greed. When the tone-deaf Kvachi rents a grand piano for a summer, he sells it not once but three times before skipping town. In one of the worst HR decisions of all time, an insurance company hires Kvachi to sell policies. He quickly figures out that bilking clients is hard work and takes out several policies of his own. A remarkable string of bad luck naturally ensues:

“We never had any illness in our family. The day before yesterday my father died. He passed away so suddenly that he couldn’t say a word. The next day our house in Kutaisi burnt down. Now I’ve had a bad accident.”

Kvachi provides its share of local Georgian color, but there is little provincial about it. Georgia, which enjoys a brief spell period of independence between the Tsarist and Soviet regimes, is a country “not even a hundred people on earth have even heard of.” As such, it soon proves unsuitable to Kvachi’s outsized ambitions, prompting him to travel first to Odessa, then on to Russia: “…everything in mysterious and infinite Russia was prepared for him, longing and waiting, like an unhappy woman for her fairytale prince.” To devise a persona compatible with this destiny, Kvachi simply anoints himself Prince Napoleon Apollonovich Kvachantiradze. In an entertaining illustration of the narcissistic logic that allows him to inhabit his characters, he subsequently sees the real Napoleon Bonaparte’s golden dinner plates on display and buys a similar set for himself: “Well, am I worse than him? I have his name!”

In St. Petersburg, Kvachi quickly ingratiates himself into Grigori Rasputin’s inner circle. When not participating in orgies with the debauched (and well-endowed) holy man, he takes charge of lucrative government contracts in Turkestan, facilitates international arms deals and, oh yes, foments the Russian Revolution, which erupts just in time to save him from the first of his death sentences. (The Revolution prompts Javakhishvili to momentarily rise above Kvachi’s cynical machinations and show, through a remarkable allegory about two Russian brothers, how world historical events are driven by more profound forces than venality.)

As he languishes in a cell awaiting his hanging, Kvachi is hounded by an impish inner voice urging him to confess his extensive misdeeds. Alas, the rakish sociopath is not one to repent, neither to his interrogators nor to himself: “Leave me alone! The past is past. Why the hell do you want the truth? Anyone can tell the truth — idiots, savages, and babies.”

Kvachi’s self-directed outburst advocates for the primacy of fiction, natural given that he is a creature forged entirely from fictions, beginning with the fake certificate of nobility his father purchased for the family at the age of five. His art depends on bribed newspaper editors, carefully sown lies, and phony mandates. Forced to flee St. Petersburg during the Revolution, one of Kvachi’s crestfallen lieutenants informs him that the only thing he has managed to save are some seals and rubber stamps. Kvachi, aware that having the power to authorize new fictions is infinitely more valuable than the trainful of palace treasures he has lost, reassures his compatriot: “You’ve saved everything!”

So entirely does Kvachi forge his character that when he finds himself on a Turkish battlefield, he suddenly becomes something other than a fraud. Too fickle to be a true poltroon, he miraculously transforms (temporarily) into a real hero:

That instant had reversed and aborted Kvachi’s life and character and endowed him with something miraculous and otherworldly. The old Kvachi had died another one, unfamiliar and new, was born a moment later, as proud and unbending, courageous and fearless as Leonides at Thermopylae, Alexander the Great, or Erekle King of Kakheti, or Napoleon at Arcola.

Despite not being particularly introspective, Kvachi does occasionally sense that his true “personality” is nothing but a bottomless pit of undefined longings. Upon first seeing the Black Sea from a train, we read:

The sea was beautiful at a distance, but Kvachi intuited its treachery, its changeability, and in anticipation he was filled with fear, trembling, and distrust.

The sea’s grandeur terrifies him. Sublimity can’t be manipulated, or conned, or blackmailed. The sea can in no way be channeled to serve Kvachi; at most it can only mirror his own roiling nature. He bears torture more stoically than this insight into the limits of his power and the vagueness of his desires.

We last see Kvachi as the kept man of a Turkish Madame, a fate that somewhat punctures his lofty image of himself as a “free soaring eagle” destined for greatness. In the novel’s final scene, Javakhishvili addresses the aging, and still restless, libertine: “So what do you want, then? I don’t think you know! I understand you, Kvachi Kvachantiradze! I understand you, my Kvachi! I understand you, my little Kvachi! I understand…I understand…” A later, 1934 version would be harsher on Kvachi, telling him to “rot in [his] pit,” but in the original (and in this English translation), Javakhishvili closes with this more empathetic gesture toward his sordid creation, whoever he is beneath his guises.

The "staff picks" shelf in any good independent bookstore is a treasure trove of book recommendations. Unmoored from media hype and even timeliness, these books are championed by trusted fellow readers. With many bookselling alums in our ranks, we offer our own "Staff Picks" in a feature appearing irregularly.The Island Of The Colorblind by Oliver Sacks recommended by AndrewAbout fourteen years ago, neurologist and author Oliver Sacks made not one but two separate journeys to Micronesia. Published in 1996, The Island of the Colorblind contains accounts of both journeys. His 1993 visit to the island of Guam took him on an exploration of a disease called lytico-bodig, endemic to the island and which in different manifestations could resemble ALS, Parkinson's, or dementia. An account of this visit, "Cycad Island" forms half of this marvelous book.A few months later, Sacks was back in Micronesia, this time to the islands of Pohnpei and Pingelap - the latter an atoll on which an astonishing minority of the population is achromatopic. Completely colorblind, achromatopes see the world in various shades of grey, but with an ability to detect differing luminances which are almost invisible to people without this condition. "The Island of the Colorblind" is Sacks' account of his visit.Part travelogue, part scientific journal, part autobiography, The Island of the Colorblind reveals oceanic islands as completely independent from continental mainland, and from each other. Volcanic islands which rose from the ocean floor, each is insulated, and each has adapted to a unique set of obstacles over countless generations. It's a fascinating read.Wittgenstein's Poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow recommended by TimothyThere is great entertainment value in listening to two people engage in a philosophical debate, even if the participants are inebriated university students blathering on for hours. But what happens when the intellectual battle lasts a mere ten minutes between two of the world's most renowned philosophers? That was the scene in Cambridge, England, in 1946, when Ludwig Wittgenstein met Karl Popper for the first time, with Bertrand Russell on hand to witness the heated exchange between two great 20th century thinkers. Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers offers a detailed account of that moment and why so much confusion arose from a discussion about the role language plays in philosophy. While it may seem disproportionate to spend 300 pages to describe an event that lasted a mere ten minutes, authors David Edmonds and John Eidinow, both BBC journalists, offer a dense but readable explanation of the culture at Cambridge University, the biographies of these two great men and how a war-torn Europe factored into the debate.Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy by Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek recommended by EmreNearly fifteen years ago, I trashed all my Bon Jovi tapes, stopped listening to my mother's Beatles records and embarked on my own quest for music. Previously I had been inclined toward Twisted Sisters, Guns N' Roses' "Appetite for Destruction," some classical music, Turkish pop and my mom's '60s folk music. Now, I was discovering Nirvana, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and most importantly Jimi Hendrix. I was obsessed with Hendrix like any adolescent boy who though a Fender Stratocaster was greater than god and could make the mountains tremble. At this point, my most revered possessions were that famous poster of Hendrix conjuring up flames from his burning guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival in '67 and Jimi Hendrix: Electric Gypsy by Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek. Shapiro and Glebbeek's incredibly well-sourced, well-researched book provides an account of this guitar god's life that escapes hero-worship, yet does not shy away from glorifying the man where he merits it. Electric Gypsy remained my bible for a long time, I would whip it out to argue points on who is a better guitar player and cite it religiously. And, 15 years on, I still want to revisit the book, with a 200-page appendix that provides a perplexing chronicle of the equipment Hendrix used, including minute details like what guitar he used on each song (if memory serves me right). There are also great background stories, love stories and drug stories. Not to mention a ton of pictures. If you like Rock 'N Roll - in which case you must, by default, love Hendrix - you are most likely to get a serious thrill from the Electric Gypsy.

4 comments:

So glad to read your excellent reviews of Russian and now Georgian authors in translation. I would never have found them on my own. I think you recommended Platonov’s “Foundation Pit,” and it was both devastating and hilarious — what IS it about the Russian 20th century? Or, really, any Russian century — I can’t get enough. “Limonov” and “Cement” are in the queue. Thanks!

After having just read Zalacain El Adventurero I’ve been in a picaresque mood and I’m so glad to have read this review. Thanks for introducing me to this author. Now this and Augie March are on my list of things to read next list!

One of my favorite books.
Easy to read and extremely interesting.
Can be partly compared with “Confessions of Felix Krull” of Thomas Mann but I think this one is much more interesting, fun and realistic.

This is what gets lost in the hand-wringing over the mergers and rumors-of-mergers between America’s Big Six (or Big Five?) publishing houses: there are more than six publishers in this country. There are countless presses that continue, every year, to publish great work. They range from the large and very well-established -- W.W. Norton and Grove/Atlantic -- all the way down to the micro-presses.
Somewhere inbetween is Melville House, which for these past few years has been producing, alongside new offerings, a delightful line called The Neversink Library. Out-of-print works, some in the public domain, are resuscitated as slim paperbacks. Harry Houdini'sThe Right Way to Do Wrong (subtitle: “A unique selection of writings by history’s greatest escape artist”) is a jewel of the collection.
This is a peculiar little book, a collection of Houdini's writings on various topics that opens with an endearing and widely applicable list of tips for the aspiring magician:
In winning your audience, remember that “Manners make fortunes,” so don’t be impertinent.
An old trick well done is far better than a new trick with no effect.
Never tell the audience how good you are; they will soon find that out for themselves.
Nothing can give greater delight to the gentler sex than to have some flowers handed to them that you have produced from a hat or paper cone.
Rabbit tricks are positive successes.
Before he was Harry Houdini he was Erik Weisz, born in Budapest in 1874, son of a rabbi. The family emigrated when he was four years old and settled in Appleton, Wis., the town he later claimed as his birthplace: “I am an American by birth,” he wrote, “born in Appleton, Wis., USA, on April 6 1873.” Why not? It’s a harmless enough deception. There’s something moving in the repetition of the statement.
The book displays Houdini's obvious fixation on the difference between what he did, his harmless deceptions -- the card tricks, the “I am an American by birth, born in the USA,” the time he reprogrammed a pair of French letter cuffs on the sly in order to expose a fraud­ -- and the deceptions that cause harm. He is a principled illusionist. The title essay is by far the longest piece in the collection. “I trust this book will afford entertaining, as well as instructive reading,” he wrote in the preface, “and that the facts and experiences, the exposés and explanations here set forth may serve to interest you, as well as put you in a position where you will be less liable to fall a victim.” He goes on to describe, in considerable detail, a dazzling array of cons and acts of perfidy, from overcoat thieves and second-story men to rigged card games and women who work in teams to steal diamonds.
But beyond the criminals, the diamond thieves and the conmen, the collection functions as a glimpse into a fascinating world of low-rent, high-risk stunt performing that’s largely faded away. Sword swallowers still exist, but the days when they could travel the country and fill theaters are over, and theirs is only one of a vast range of peculiar acts that Houdini encountered on the road: “In my earlier days in the smaller theaters of America, before the advent of the B.F. Keith and E.F. Albee Theaters, I occasionally ran across a sailor calling himself English Jack, who could swallow live frogs and bring them up again with apparent ease.”
Besides English Jack, there is “that degenerate, Bosco, who ate living snakes.” There are poison-eaters and stone-eaters and a man whose stage act involves drinking 30 or 40 glasses of beer. Houdini writes at great length of the magnificent Thardo, an unusually beautiful woman with whom he performed in Chicago, whose act was based on her apparent immunity to rattlesnake poison. The collection provides of a glimpse at the fascinations of a truly unusual man, and a glimpse of a younger, stranger America.